Schedule Intervention to Increase Sustainable Walking Activity in Midlife Working Adults

While people commonly understand that regular physical exercise conveys many health benefits,
only 20% of U.S. adults take regular exercise and they have difficulty maintaining new
healthy behaviors. The goal of this study is to use a planning intervention to help establish
and maintain a daily step regimen in working midlife adults. The investigators will ask
participants to plan when, where, and how to act on a daily walking goal in conjunction with
a scheduling intervention to increase the chances that they will maintain this new regimen.
Participants will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: consistent schedule,
inconsistent schedule, no schedule. All participants will be provided with an accelerometer
to measure their daily activity and as a behavioral support for our intervention and they
will be given a step goal. The goal given to each individual will be to increase immediately
their daily steps to a level based on recommended guidelines (e.g., Hill, Wyatt, Reed, and
Peters, 2003). The investigators will test which version of the scheduling intervention is
most successful for increasing and maintaining step counts. It is predicted that participants
in the consistent schedule condition will increase their step count more than those
participants in the no schedule control condition, and that they will maintain this activity
for a longer period after the intervention period is complete than those participants in the
inconsistent schedule condition.

Inclusion Criteria:

- currently working 3 or more days (or 24 hours or more) per week;

- physically minimally active (as determined using the International Physical Activity
Questionnaire (IPAQ)

Exclusion Criteria:

- a recent (within the past 6 months) cardiovascular event, or fall.

- anyone who already exercises regularly, 3 times a week or more for at least 30
minutes, will be excluded